Firstly, a quick overview of who we are and where we are at!
R-Ladies Melbourne is one of the chapters of the worldwide R-Ladies community comprising 229 chapters, 93300 members, across 65 countries (as of today, source) and the first chapter established in Australia in 2016. In March 2020, R-Ladies Melbourne was incorporated as a not-for-profit organization and we are now also known as R-Ladies Melbourne Inc!
We are proud to have >2283 members in our local Meetup community and also a growing online community of >2070 followers on Twitter. We are currently the top 7th R-Ladies chapter in terms of membership globally.
In 2020 we had to pivot to a new way of working. In Australia, 2022 started transitioning out of of lock downs and we were able to hold almost all of our events face to face with one exception. We continuously provided online streaming to keep events flexible for our audience.
We had our virtual annual general meeting in June 2022 and selected the following new leadership members:
AGM 2022
R-Ladies Melbourne Inc Committee Members and Organisers in 2022-2023
We have been enjoying the benefits of file migration using the Google account. Huge thanks to our Treasurer Nikki Rubinstein who has not only spent huge amount of time ensuring this migration was successful, she also worked really hard on ACNC documentation and reporting period alignments.Expression of interest forms for potential speakers has proven itself to be a great tool. If you would like to be a presenter or run a workshop, you can use our EOI form here. Thanks to committee member Anna Quaglieri for arranging this form! We have also embraced our using eventbrite for our events as well as meetup to manage the face to face and online attendees! Thanks to our Vice President Dai Danyang for setting up the eventbrite account. Many thanks to our committee members for handling the event operations.
We gathered to say farewell to Shazia! She was instrumental in our operations as our president last year. We are super excited for her new adventure in London.
Thanks for the sweet send-off @RLadiesMelb 💜 will miss all of you so much! https://t.co/eBsuq1Wir3
— Shazia Ruybal Pesántez (@DrShaziaRuybal) October 5, 2022
I would like to thank our Vice President Daidai who kept on going supporting the operations online from Brisbane where she is pursuing her PhD.
In the next few sections, I will discuss some of the highlights of our meetups in 2022-2023. Check out the links to the tweets, slides and youtube videos where available.
We hosted several meet-ups that covered a wide-range of topics in tidy data and constructing plots, spatial data analysis, workflows in R for reproducibility, tools for open and reproducible research and careers in public health.
One of our biggest supporter and data visualisation expert Professor Di Cook from Monash University shared her extensive knowledge in constructing plots using tidy data. Professor Di Cook has introduced the tidy data concepts in practice and showcased how to make inferences from plots. You can access the video recording of this event at Youtube.
The workflow of tidy data, constructing plots and making data-driven decisions workshop, September meet-up
Another amazing event given by @visnut! Di has been such great mentor to @RLadiesMelb and we are very lucky to have her again 💜. Thanks @SayaniGupta07 for taking the pictures for us! pic.twitter.com/wRy3IDBgeo
— Daidai (@Daidaidai2014) September 1, 2022
Great to have @visnut tonight at @RLadiesMelb
— Momeneh Foroutan (@S_Foroutan) September 1, 2022
Di was the very first speaker of #rladies in September 2016, when we founded the chapter! Awesome to have your continuous support Di! pic.twitter.com/aIiikUwWtg
We were excited to have Sherry Zhang as our guest speaker. Her research focuses on exploring multivariate and spatio-temporal data with visual and exploratory data analysis tools. Sherry focused on sf, tibble and cubble packages then showed us how to create glyph maps in R. My personal favorite part was how she summarised sf operations in one slide which was super handy! This was an excellent workshop where complicated spatial topics were introduced and explored. You can find the slides here and watch the recording on Youtube.
Switching between space and time: Spatio-temporal analysis with cubble workshop, September meet-up
Getting into different geometrical shapes to store spatial data - all available in #sf:
— R-Ladies Melbourne Inc (@RLadiesMelb) September 27, 2022
- POINTS: vector of pairs of coordinates
- LINESTRING: matrix of pairs
- POLYGON: list of matrix of pairs vectors
- MULTIPOLYGON: list of polygons pic.twitter.com/7AuJluKQBh
Looking forward to hearing @huizezhangsh at @RLadiesMelb next week https://t.co/w5qj3BFI7q
— Dr Di Cook (@visnut) September 19, 2022
Reproducibility is bread and butter of high quality research. We were delighted to have Dr Jovana Maksimovic who works in the field of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology for over 14 years. She walked us through her workflow in R which has proven itself useful in accomplishing reproducibility for researchers in her field. You can find one of the latest examples of Jovana’s analysis webpages here. She has been making her research accessible to help others!
Wonderful slides @JovMaksimovic! I'm beyond honored that #workflowr has played a role in your reproducibility journey. Thanks for sharing with the @RLadiesMelb community! https://t.co/k9WXLjDmz6
— John Blischak (@jdblischak) October 14, 2022
In this wonderful event we had Cynthia Huang as our guest speaker. Her energy and excitement was infectious! She walked us through version control, literate programming, tidy data, code styles, testing, validation and more! She has shared her experiences and mentioned how overwhelming it can be to adopt to the ever-evolving tech landscape! You can find the slides here.
If you are looking for an entry point to have your environment set up for reproducibility, I highly recommend checking these slides out!
Join me on Weds night in-person or online for my first R-ladies talk! I’ll be sharing my misadventures with reproducibility in #rstats, and how I deal with my ever-growing “I should learn this” pile. (Or just come for the pizza 🍕) https://t.co/roGSsICacD
— Cynthia Huang @cynthiahqy@fosstodon.org (@cynthiahqy) November 28, 2022
We also brought some holiday gifts!
See you all tonight at @WEHI_research to learn about #reproducibility & get ready for a Christmas 🎁 with a #hex stickers bonanza gifted by @posit_pbc !! #rstats https://t.co/tZr5JSwtmJ pic.twitter.com/O4pRl8dCir
— R-Ladies Melbourne Inc (@RLadiesMelb) November 29, 2022
We often mix-up our meet-ups by collaborating with other related organizations and groups in Melbourne as well as hear from local experts on topics of interest to our community, such as insights on data viz experiences and consulting and working on collaborative projects!
Collaborative and supportive diverse members of the R community motivated me to join R-Ladies Melbourne in 2021. #rstats has been one of the most inclusive communities I wanted to be part of. I’m inspired by women and gender minorities who create amazing R content worldwide and proud to be part of the R-Ladies Melbourne team which is dedicated to creating a safe space for women and gender minorities. It has been a difficult year where we had movements in the committee and more responsibilities fell on to our committee members. We have persevered through the challenges and made it work. I am thankful for our committee who has put together amazing events. Excited to see what the new year will bring!
Our amazing sponsors and the stunning view from the venue provided by Nous
We are happy to have always received positive feedback from our speakers, community and long-time supporters.
“R Ladies Melbourne is a globally connected, and consistently insightful meetup group. The organisational team is annually refreshed and coordinates a wonderful list of speakers. It has sustained the community through the isolation members faced during the lockdowns of the past year, with coding and data analysis seminars and workshops. As we transition back to a more normal life, face-to-face meetups have started this past month, giving members a chance to hang out and chat more informally with speakers, over pizza and beer. But it is hybrid, so that members with more personal constraints can join by zoom still. I thoroughly enjoy being a part of this inclusive group.”
Finally, do not forget to follow the R-Ladies Melbourne Inc if you would like to be updated about us and our events; we do our best to record our events, and make all of our events’ materials available on Github.
I would like to thank all the past and present committee members for their support and friendship.